Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

jrepin writes "KDE's integrated development environment KDevelop has just reached version 4.5. 'In this new version you will find brand new integration for Unit Tests, so that you can easily run and debug them while working on your projects. Furthermore, you'll find an iteration of our New Class wizard, many changes regarding polishing the UI in different places, better support for C++11 features and some other things you'll find along the way.'"

Once in a while I have tried KDevelop to make GUI programs with C/C++, but it feels clumsy.
Recently I have used QtCreator, and I'm very happy with it. I think it's currently the best RAD tool in Linux (what I have tried) to develop GUI applications

More seriously and objectively; how does Kdevelop compares to VS and eclipse or other modern IDE ?

I had never heard of Kdevelop before although I am using KDE right now. This post got me curious about Kdevelop but I am too lazy to install it and test it out at this point. Could anybody with real life experience answer my qu

I use Eclipse for Android development, and KDevelop for everything else. A few years ago, I made a short comparison (here [noughmad.com], check out the screenshots). It has great code completion and code coloring. KDevelop only supports C++ and recently Python, and QML is planned to join them soon.

In the end, it really depends on what you use it for. Eclipse has good integration with Android SDK, so I use it for that. KDevelop works great with CMake and Git. For reading C, C++ or Python code, KDevelop is by far the best option.

KDevelop3 was a good development environment. It supported many languages. KDevelop4, last I checked, supported C++ and C. If that's all you need, it may be a decent environment.

OTOH, even KDevelop3 was oriented to Qt. If you wanted a different GUI library it was an uphill battle. (Not necessarily a hard one, but you were swimming upstream.) With KDevelop4 I'm not sure you have any alternatives, but I'll admit I didn't check carefully, as my development isn't focused around C/C++... largely because t

Could anybody with real life experience answer my question about how it compares to VS and eclipse for example ?

This is my own opinion, and others' opinions may differ. I used KDevelop a lot when I was doing C++ programming in the KDE 3.x years.

It managed to save my entire project once, when I did something really stupid (outside of KDevelop) which destroyed most of the source files in my project. I had no version control back then, but KDevelop had a complete copy of my project in memory. I was able to re-save all of my source files from with KDevelop to reconstruct my project -whew-.

Any coder who loses more than a few hours worth of work because of an IDE is an idiot, even in those days. You may have manually had to back up but it was enough enough to have an automated script that would come and zip up your project into an archive every so often, even when I was young and stupid I knew that much 15 years ago.

Nowadays we have proper source control so it's easy to commit changes and revert to a prior iteration if you break something. As far as backup goes, I use Github as my first line of defense because it's accessable from everywhere and cloning/syncing the latest codebase between machines is trivial. Github isn't going away anytime soon so it's relatively safe to rely on but I still create tarball backups and store them on my computer and offsite. The only downside of using old-fashioned tarballs as backup is

Sure but which toolkit do you stick in the IDE's designer? Even on Windows there are half a dozen UI apis people use. Even Microsoft uses a different one for each Office release, it seems.

KDevelop is a C and C++ IDE, not an MFC IDE, or a WinForms IDE. Or even a Qt IDE. In the olden days it used to have a GUI designer built into it, but that was removed some time ago, because Qt Designer (now Qt Creator) provided a much better GUI design tool that could be used in conjunction with KDevelop.

Even Microsoft used to do this - original WPF development (and other design work) was done in Expression Blend. They only scrapped that idea and merged the functionality to VS quite recently.

Maybe the point is that a tool to do specialised work isn't what people want, so the FOSS crowd need to decide: do they have a single IDE that does "everything" (eg eclipse?) or a lot of tools that do a single thing well that can hook together.

Maybe the individual tools idea works for the command line because the interf

True, I wrote a small C compiler for embedded devices using turbo-pascal back then. Same concept as compiling for a different target platform, you just produce executable machine code for whatever target and you can use any language on any platform to do that.

The last one I wrote was in Python, but the job would dictate the tool more than the other way around. This was to program an on chip executable dfx structure designed by me for an on chip circuit designed by me. So I'm the only person in the world that knows the language or the assembly and I'm the only person who would use said compiler. Lets hope I don't get hit by a bus, because I've got a shitload of documentation to write.

http://scummos.blogspot.de/ [blogspot.de] I guess its not released as stable yet, my understanding from reading about the release was that it was. I have been using kdevelop as my python editor for a while. Haven't tried the new release yet. I tend to stick to the versions my distro provides updates for.

KDevelop3 supported Python. When i've tried to use KDevelop4, it has NOT supported Python. Perhaps that's just the Debian repository version, but I haven't seen any prior indication that this is the case. The evidence that I've seen is that KDevelop4 supports C and C++ and that's it.

Qt Creator is so far ahead of Kdevelop its not even funny. If people want to be productive, using KDevelop is sadly not feasible. It never really was, even back then when it started I used C++ Builder and Visual Studio 6, both ran circles around Kdevelop, and quite frankly any OSS solution. Now I am a bit older and not as scared of makefiles and so on, but there is no OSS RAD IDE out there, fact. Qt Creator is close, and I prefer this over Visual Studio, even on windows and its better than XCode too.

Have you even tried KDevelop since version 4? Or, in the proud KDE tradition, something after 4.2?

QtCreator has some additional integration for pure Qt projects, such as qmake and QML. On the other hand, KDevelop has far superior completion, and even code coloring. Not just syntax, but every variable and function has its own color. For me, this is the killer feature that only KDevelop has, and I find it very very hard to read code without it. I tried some newer versions of VS, Eclipse and QtCreator, but none of them have coloring, and none of them have completion comparable to KDevelop.

I searched for screenshots before commenting, so you're wrong. And obviously instead of saying how I was wrong in my assessment, you just bashed my opinion as unfounded. Typical Anonymous Coward remark.

The highlighting is very well thought out, and there is no point in arguing about it if you haven't tried it for at least a week.

I've already trimmed down my color usage to a very small number because I did not like the rainbow effect based on months of experience with standard colorization in IDEs, and I already have mark occurrences in Eclipse, so no, I do not need to try it for a week.

No, my point is I only like a limited set of colors, and they have to pull their weight, which other people may agree with.

How is that a reason to grump about KDevelop's syntax highlighting?

Because it was claimed that the KDevelop syntax coloring feature was both superior and unique. The mark occurrences feature in Eclipse accomplishes a similar purpose without adding to the rainbow effect.

I just don't get what you wanted to achieve with your comment.

Maybe if you weren't playing KDevelop defender and tried to see things from my point of view it wouldn't be so hard.

You complained that a feature which you didn't try

Yet I saw what it looked like, and had experience with other busy colo

The rainbow colors are useful because you can roughly tell the data flow in a method without even reading a single character, just by looking at the colors. Which, in my experience, with a bit of patience, is way faster than clicking every variable ot mark its occurences or reading the code.

This is at least an informative argument instead of your past several comments.

There is no arguing about it being unique -- it is. There is no other application with that feature.

My argument was that a similar purpose could be accomplished with mark occurrences. You have at least addressed that argument now.

which is just FUD. It's neither correct, nor is there any valuable opinion or reasoning contained in the statement.

I was basing my statement off the "+5 Informative" comment from Noughmad and a quick look at screenshots to verify: "every variable and function has its own color", so your classification as FUD is an ad hominem character attack on your part. As for the reasoning, that was in the very next sentence, wh

That's an expression of a negative opinion of something I find ugly. There's nothing wrong with it in a casual context as I backed it up, and it definitely isn't "FUD", as in misleading propaganda.

the information it was "barf"ing about was totally wrong

For it to be FUD it would have to be an intent on my part to spread wrong information. I was clear in my post that I was asking a question, and furthermore, I was basing my information on what the "+5 Informative" guy said about it, as I quoted. This is the basis for a back and forth where you can describe the tec

If that is your idea of a question, then I'm happy I don't have to deal with your questions more often.

Welcome to Slashdot, where the comments are harsh, but it's just a microcosm of real-world reaction when something seems like crap based on previous experience. As a developer having a thick skin and some patience can help.

For me, this is the killer feature that only KDevelop has, and I find it very very hard to read code without it.

I should add that Eclipse has a way of highlighting uses of a particular variable that doesn't result in the rainbow overload. Just click on the variable name and it will automatically mark all occurrences for you.

KDE people makes awesome apps but it's too hard to get them working on windows. I used to use KDevelop a lot for C/C++, but having to constantly switch computers/places/OSs to develop (depending on the target platform), makes QtCreator the only IDE I can really use..

...really understands the power of KDevelop. The best feature of KDevelop is that it is built around the best GUI editor ever invented - Kate. Seriously, a Linux developer needs nothing more than a very good text editor and access to unix shell and commandline tools. KDevelop, as every good IDE, goes futher and besides the superb editor, provides support for projects, autocompletion, debugger integration and so on.I have used KDevelop for many of my C++ projects and despite a couple of bugs, it has been a g

KDevelop 3 was indeed pretty nice and I used it for a while. But then -- like too many OSS projects these days -- developers decided it'd be much better if they rewrote it. The result is that version 3 stagnated for a long time and when KDevelop 4 was finally ready, it ditched support for many features, including autoconf/automake which I used for all my projects. That's when I switched to Eclipse/CDT and I've been happy with it since then.